The Untarnished Truth of InterCountry Adoption

Walker Bird [00:00:00]:
We're so pleased to introduce today's guest. Her name is Lynelle Long. She is an international expert on adoptee rights, intercountry adoptee rights, and she has sat on committees at the Hague in the Netherlands, and she advocates for the right of adoptees to their identity because they are barred from access to birth records in many countries, including most of the United States, which precludes them from having some access to their genetic history. That just that inner knowing of where we come from. She sheds light not only on the good aspects of it, but on the bad aspects of inner country adoption, which can range anywhere from stolen children to abuse of the adopted child or complete abandonment of the adopted child. Certain aspects that, you know, we just have any knowledge of or exposure to in most walks of American life. So we think you'll find our conversation very educational, eye opening in many respects, and also inspiring. And we hope that we can help Lynelle bring more light into the world.

Lynelle Long [00:01:11]:
So much of our documentation in adoption records, especially in intercountry, is falsified. There was no one checking to make sure that, you know, that what's documented is correct. There's no one verifying that indeed, the people who purportedly brought the child in and gave it up is even their relatives. You know, like, there's no DNA testing to make sure that if you're signing and relinquishing your child that they are indeed biologically DNA connected to this child that they're signing over. So you can see how easy it is for someone else to be placed in, in their place to go, oh, yeah, I'm the birth mother here. I'm signing away. And in fact, we have it documented. You know, a lot of the Sri Lankan adoptions were done where they would purposely hire a pretend birth mother to do the thumb imprint and pretend that she's signing away her child.

Lynelle Long [00:02:05]:
And the reason why they found out about that is because they even gave a photo of that woman to the child's parents. That child grew up, goes and finds that woman years later. And the woman then says, oh, actually, I'm not your mother. And they even do a DNA test to prove it. And she says, I was actually paid to do that. So this is the adoption industry. It is rife with trickery, corruption, falsification, because it is a system that allows it, because there are no checks and balances, no external independent vetting to make sure that any of the records that even get put together for an inter country adoptee are even true or not. It is rubber stamped by A government, and usually it is the very same government who are paid, bribed, or corrupted to actually put all this paperwork through because they're making 40 to 60,000 US dollars off every adoption.

Lynelle Long [00:02:56]:
Why would they not do it? Who could resist such easy money?

Walker Bird [00:03:04]:
My Inner Knowing empowering you to find your compass for the journey. We are dedicated to supporting you to rediscover and trust your natural ability to navigate life. Each day by sharing insight and experience through the lens of two professional communicators and their guests, we intend to prompt internal inquiry that supports all those willing to explore a unique path.

Lynelle Long [00:03:32]:
Yeah, it's very heavy, this stuff, isn't it? It's.

Walker Bird [00:03:35]:
It is. And I. You know, once we start, if we get down that road, I'll probably ask you, you know, how you. How you carry that. You know, I mean, I know you carry it personally because you lived it too, but carrying everybody else's. It's just. Even just reading the case studies is just so much. It just.

Walker Bird [00:03:56]:
I could. There's just a lot of emotion that comes up and. And, you know, I'm an outsider to it. So. Anyway, it's just. It's.

Lynelle Long [00:04:07]:
I think I've had decades of building that resilience. You know, when you've lived through it yourself and when you've come through your own, there's a certain level of resilience that you build in terms of being able to cope with huge amounts of trauma. So, you know, and if you read my paper on sexual abuse, where 30 of us share about our sexual abuse in adoptive families, it's. That was an incredibly difficult paper for me to compile and publish, and it's. It is an enormous weight. But I do. I feel. I guess I feel so honored that adoptees are even willing to share their inner truth with me.

Lynelle Long [00:04:49]:
And I feel. I feel like, you know, I guess out of all of. All of us, I feel that because I have healed this far, I kind of feel like it's a bit of a burden on me to make sure something's done about it, I guess. And that's why I'm so propelled and motivated to. To continue to speak out and to continue to, you know, carry that flame forward and speak for those who are so often completely voiceless, you know, where they just can't even articulate what's even happened to them, let alone talk about the systemic issues and the big picture. So, yeah, I do feel like. I do feel like a big part of my life purpose has been to, you know, live this shitty life that I Had. But to be able to turn it around and.

Lynelle Long [00:05:38]:
And, you know, help champion for others who have had very similar situations and circumstances. And I know how hard it is to actually break out of that survival mode and to be able to get to the point where you are actually thriving and able to carry and hold deep trauma, but also be able to champion for those who it's affecting. Yeah. Morning to you guys. Well, it's morning for me. It's late day for you.

Walker Bird [00:06:19]:
7:00 clock at night here.

Lynelle Long [00:06:21]:
Yeah. Unfortunately, you have to go to bed with all this. Yeah. Sleep, right?

Walker Bird [00:06:28]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Theresa Hubbard [00:06:29]:
That's okay. Early in my career, l. I had a young woman who had been adopted from Russia into a military family and was used by the father and the older males in the family really, as their sexual toy. Yeah, yeah. And the amount of trauma that she had and the amount of, you know, self harm and suicidality and attachment and it was a lot.

Lynelle Long [00:07:11]:
Oh, it just affects every facet of your life. Yeah. You know, it's devastating. You know, and this is why I'm so against adoption for its lack of follow up on any of us and check ins. It's. We are just so vulnerable, you know, and this side of it is not talked about enough. You know, that was the biggest message I tried to share out of that paper that I did publish because, you know, adoption, although people think it's wonderful. Yes, the concept is a lovely ideal, but we need to look at the reality of what actually happens and be honestly having conversations about it and saying, how can we prevent this from being the worst case nightmare and how do we make it safer given what we know? So there's just so many things we need to do to.

Lynelle Long [00:08:02]:
To change it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because we shouldn't be having outcomes like that. And you know, sadly for me, that's a pretty typical story that I hear.

Theresa Hubbard [00:08:12]:
Right.

Lynelle Long [00:08:14]:
Yeah. I. Out of. Out of. In one year, I started recording how many adoptees opened up and told me about sexual abuse. And in one year I had 120 names. And out of that 120, I, you know, got 30 of them to share their stories in our paper. But that, that demonstrates to you how many are still so impacted that they cannot even write their stories and share it because they're so trodden down by life and all of that trauma that's unresolved and undealt with and unsupported.

Lynelle Long [00:08:49]:
You know, there's only a very few amount of us who actually come out of it the other end, who can speak about it, and empower ourselves and, you know. Yeah, so it's, it's, it's. There are so many areas like that, the deported ones, the adoptees who've had the failed adoptions and rehomed and sent to facilities, facilities and treatment facilities and further abused and traumatized and you know, they, all of us have just, you know, leave the worst case nightmares of adoption like that. But, you know, it's not on a, it's not a trauma Olympics, but it's to say that these just happen too often for us to close our eyes to it and do nothing to continue to perpetuate a naive view of adoption. You know, if you're going to talk about adoption, at least be real, listen to the real hardest of the stories because that tells you where things are fundamentally going wrong from a systemic point of view and it tells you what we've got to do to change it so that it's not happening, you know, on a regular basis. Yeah, yeah.

Theresa Hubbard [00:10:00]:
Lynelle, what in, in this world, what do you call this? Like what like is, you know, because we always name everything. So is it like the other side of adoption, the secret side of adoption? Like in your, in this world, like, how do, what do people call it?

Lynelle Long [00:10:27]:
Well, adoptees call it the truth of adoption. The truth Adoption.

Theresa Hubbard [00:10:31]:
Okay.

Lynelle Long [00:10:32]:
Yeah.

Theresa Hubbard [00:10:33]:
Okay.

Lynelle Long [00:10:34]:
Yeah. The untarnished truth. Yeah, we, we don't sugarcoat it like the adoption industry does. You know, they like to think it's a win win. We like to talk about the untarnished truth about what it really is like for the worst of us who suffer the worst. And there's no doubt that there are, as I was speaking to Walker before, there are no doubt adoptees who've had wonderful experiences. Sure. And I don't deny that and I don't minimize that and they are welcome to their wonderful, you know, stories.

Lynelle Long [00:11:12]:
But I say that there are too many of us who have struggled, suffered further trauma on top of the relinquishment trauma, the disruption trauma, the displacement trauma of being separated from our origins. And in these adoptive families where, you know, even the basics of just, even understanding race, the role that race plays, you know, there's just such a lack of ignorance, especially in America, unfortunately, because you are the. Not you personally, but your country is the biggest adopting country in the world for inter country adoption. You know, America has absorbed over half of the 1.2 million as a minimum number of inter country adoptees sent and shipped around the world. So your country has got the most impacted people. And yet, you know, I can't help but notice around the world, from country to country, America, Italy, Spain, you know, the three of the top five receiving countries actually have the most pro adoption, the most skewed perspective of adoption out of any of the other countries around the world. And you know, obviously that goes hand in hand with being the biggest, you know, demander of children because they obviously believe that what they're truly doing is good and noble and right. But you know, I, I guess I'm here to kind of try and shine some light on, you know, it's, it's good to educate yourself about what it really is instead of just listening to a one sided perspective that it's wonderful, noble, kind, saving, rescuing and to be a bit more awoke about it, a bit more aware, a bit more, you know.

Lynelle Long [00:13:05]:
Yeah. Question curious about what is this really, what, what are we really doing when we take in a child from another country under this noble gesture? You know, I challenge people to look at the concepts of the colonial underpinnings of intercountry adoption. You know, that, that rape and pillage of a country's best resources. You know, you're taking, you're taking children from a country that actually needs them the most for their future generations. You know, we all know that countries grow and develop based on the energy and the efforts and the intellectual power of the younger generations. They are the ones that are going to support the elderly as they get older. So when you take that from a country, you're essentially still continuing with that colonial, you know, mentality of let's rape and pillage this country because you know, to hell with them. We're just going to take, because we want, it's, it's a very, it's a very self centered mentality, I believe, you know, and it's, it's kind of the opposite of everything that this is such a contradictory thing for those who do it from an evangelical perspective because you know, the very concepts of God and, and Christianity you would think should be about looking out for your, for your neighbors and, and helping each other and you know, cooperating and collaborating.

Lynelle Long [00:14:31]:
But instead we take and plunder, you know, their children and we don't think too deeply about it. So these are just some of the, you know, things that I think people who haven't thought deeply about it, you know, really need to challenge themselves on.

Walker Bird [00:14:49]:
What would you say? I mean, when we say the tarnished truth, that was just one aspect of international adoption and we've talked off the record about so many others when so many of our United States listeners would say, well, gosh, we're just, you know, taking care of children who need help and, and giving them a better life. And hopefully I'm not offending you by stating that, but I, I think that is the assumption that so many of us have without being educated about the tarnished truth, as you put it. So if you could give us, you know, an overview of that, maybe it would help educate people more just other than the one aspect we just talked about, you know, the colonial taking of children. And it's not always a willing, and maybe commonly not a willing transfer of parental rights from the birth parent in the country of origin. Right, you've described that.

Lynelle Long [00:15:54]:
Absolutely.

Walker Bird [00:15:55]:
But so many. So could you give us some more?

Lynelle Long [00:16:00]:
Yeah. Where do you, where do you even begin to try and educate people? Because it's, it's huge. You'd need to do a series on it. But, but, you know, essentially, you know, I think the fundamental part that most people forget is what is the child losing when you rip them away from everything that they are born to that should be theirs innately, intuitively, even just a simple concept as knowing what my name should have been, or knowing what date I should have been I was born on, or knowing the situations of my parents, who I was born to and, and why I came to be removed from them. Like so many of us have had the majority of that information falsified because adoption in its processes being so complicated and involving so many people and players and stakeholders, you know, being government, non government, it's such a convoluted process when you transfer a child from one country to the other, whether it's done legally or not, and whether it's done ethically or not. These are the many challenges with inter country adoption. And fundamentally, at the baseline of every adoption, whether it be an international one or not, what you're doing is you're using an archaic legal mechanism of transferring parentage rights which cost the child. Because even if I am in the worst case scenario of needing new parents because my other ones were, you know, deemed violent, neglectful, harmful, right.

Lynelle Long [00:17:37]:
Even if that is the case, why should I lose my connections to the rest of my kin, my grandparents, my brothers, my sisters, my aunts, my uncles, this is one of the fundamental issues in adoption that people don't think very deeply about, is that legally adoption severs our ability to be connected to the rest of our kin forever unless we have the ability to actually undo that adoption. I'm in a country where Australia has allowed legislation changes that actually give adoptees the right to annul and undo their adoption, which allows us to revert back to being legally connected to our biological family. I would argue in this modern time of understanding human and child's rights, that children should be able to be cared for without losing so much legally. So I shouldn't lose my citizenship. I should be able to be a dual citizen of both nations. I should be able to be recognized as being a citizen of my birth country and a citizen of my adoptive country. But the reality is, even citizenship we have to fight for. And we know that in the U.S.

Lynelle Long [00:18:45]:
for example, that all the adoptees who came to the United States prior to, I think it was 1989 or 1998, not sure which way around, but they got left out of the current citizenship act that gave them automatic citizenship. So there are, there are hundreds who are adopted in my era who arrived in America to American parents who actually don't, are not granted automatic citizenship despite them living their whole life there. So there are just so many fundamental rights that I've just named from knowing our birth information, knowing where we've come from, being able to know who our kin are, having citizenship rights, having rights in both the birth and adoptive country. So many of those things we are still fighting for. And people just don't even realize that. They think that everything's a happily ever after story. And I always like to say to them, well, you know, even in the best case scenario where we perhaps find our birth families, which is still a fairly low occurrence by the way, even if we do find our birth families, why can't we claim them as our legal relative? Because by law we are still adopted and we are still legally severed from them. In the United States, out of your 50 plus states, you've only got three out of those 52 that allow an adoptee to even undo an adoption in order to be able to be legally reconnected back with their original kin, that's just atrocious, right? That's, that's not, that's not having a right to be able to claim who you are as the truth.

Lynelle Long [00:20:23]:
So this is why so many of us who are adoptee advocates like myself speak out about these lack of fundamental rights. Regardless of where you sit with adoption, about it being a wonderful or not thing, you can't help but look at the legal lack of rights that we face around America. And it's, it's just, you know, a complete lack of rights. So these things need to change. If you've got a country so pro adoption and you're so focused on, well, this should be a good thing. Well make it a good thing instead of giving us so many barriers, hurdles to jump over, to even be able to have what everybody else has got. Yeah. So yeah, there's a few things there.

Lynelle Long [00:21:13]:
Yeah.

Walker Bird [00:21:13]:
There. If you apply to revoke your adoption or to, to undo it in those few states in the United States that allow it, does that affect your citizenship?

Lynelle Long [00:21:26]:
No, apparently not. And it shouldn't. And that's the way it is in Australia as well. So I've undone my adoption and I still have Australian citizenship.

Walker Bird [00:21:35]:
Okay.

Lynelle Long [00:21:35]:
What I don't have is my Vietnamese citizenship. So I'm still trying for 40 odd years. I'm 52 now, but I've been trying for many years to be able to reclaim my birth citizenship, to be considered a Vietnamese citizen, to be able to travel there, live there as a Vietnamese, to be recognized as Vietnamese because I in fact was born there and it was through no choice of my own that I've been airlifted and taken, you know, to, to another country. We don't have a say and yet it's our legacy that we've got to navigate through and often with no help, especially no help legally. So it's a minefield for us. Yeah.

Walker Bird [00:22:18]:
Have you been able to, I'm assuming you had access to birth family records in Australia or not?

Lynelle Long [00:22:25]:
No, not for me. Not for me. For domestic adoptees, yes. The records are all open now in every single state of Australia. We're quite advance, advanced in the fact that Australia's recognised the wrongs of historic forced adoptions. They've apologised to the mothers and the families, they've apologised to the adoptees. They're even one of the first states of Australia, Victoria is now offering compensation to the mothers. So that's huge.

Lynelle Long [00:22:52]:
And it's very similar to the way Australia has dealt with the, the indigenous people of this country where they've apologised to them too and offered them compensation. So we're quite progressive in that. Although we're still very behind in inter country adoption politics. You know, despite people like me leading the way for a long time, 15 plus years, trying to get Australia to acknowledge the wrongs in our inter country adoptions, Australia still has refused to do that. So, you know, compared to other European countries that are leading the way in doing adoption investigations, apologizing, stopping and banning their international adoptions, because when they have done each of these investigations indeed shown the huge systemic practices that have infiltrated the entire industry and have not touched it's, it's touched every single country that has been adopted from and to. So, you know, it's a really interesting time right now in the world for intercountry adoption because naturally, anyway, you're seeing a massive drop from the sending countries sending their children. But I would argue that that's because they've become much more aware of the risks for us. There's been adoptees that have been, you know, sent back to their birth countries unaccompanied.

Lynelle Long [00:24:13]:
There's been murders, there's been deaths. There's been adoptees like me speaking out saying how wrong this is and how we're not protected and we're not granted automatic citizenship in countries like America. You know, we're speaking out loudly and saying this is what's wrong with this system of adoption. And both countries are hearing that and they're going, geez, you know, I mean, the Korean adoptees shamed Korea when Korea ran the Olympics in Seoul. And the Korean adoptees had quite a platform to say, we're a first world country and yet we're still exporting children. Like, what the, you know, what is going on here? And it really forces people to take a look at just what the adoption industry is when it is no longer about poverty or war, but simply about just a trade and exchange of children as if they're a commodity like gold or any other commodity. So, yeah, we are definitely a traded commodity between countries. And I sit, you know, I'm one of the few adoptees that sits at the Hague working group meetings listening in on all the conversations between governments, you know, and this has been a decades long practice that countries will send children to each other as a form of self diplomacy.

Lynelle Long [00:25:31]:
And that's essentially how South Korea's got the biggest, you know, number of children being sent to the United States because of the diplomacy between the two countries.

Walker Bird [00:25:42]:
Tell us more about that self diplomacy piece.

Lynelle Long [00:25:46]:
What do you know?

Walker Bird [00:25:47]:
I mean, what's the incentive for the parents? Are they just.

Lynelle Long [00:25:52]:
There's no incentive for the parent. Oh, you mean which parents are you talking about? The Korean parents?

Walker Bird [00:25:56]:
Yeah, the Korean.

Lynelle Long [00:25:57]:
Well, there's no incentive for the Korean parents, you know, because they were often and often are not even advised that their children are being sent to another country. So, you know, you've got, you've got countries where initially like the Korean War started and there were a huge number of children who were colored and mixed. And Korea being a very patriarchal and very. Not sure what the right word is politically, but given their cultural focus on purity and, and family lineage. They did not want mixed race children. And that's initially how the Korean program started, because Americans realized that, you know, these children were the children of GI soldiers based in Korea. And so there was some sense there of responsibility of, well, we should kind of take a bit of responsibility for our own children, our own blood. And that's initially how the Korea program started in the middle of the Korea war.

Lynelle Long [00:26:57]:
But once the Korea war finished, you know, you can see how Korea continued to send out mass numbers of children even though they were pure Koreans, no longer just the mixed ones. And the same happened in Vietnam, by the way. So my country of birth, Vietnam, you know, you had the US military in there. Again, just like in South Korea, you had this soft diplomacy. And of course that's why you got Operation Babylift, because the South Vietnamese president, it was not an Operation Baby Lift from North Vietnam, it's from south, where the Americans had a relationship with the South. And so it was a form of, you know, well, let us take back some of our mixed race children again and let us ship them back to America where, you know, they might be with their fathers. But after the Vietnam War ended, you still had children being sent out and you still have them being sent out today because it is a form of, you know, we'll, we'll give you our children as a sign of good faith that we have positive relationship with you, we trust that you're going to be looking after them. And in fact, when I'm currently reading Barbara, I think her name's Demeric, but she's written the.

Lynelle Long [00:28:07]:
Really, there's a lot of publicity right now on a book, the Bamboo, what is it? The Bamboo Child. But it's essentially she's a journalist who's just published a book on the twins from China that got separated. And in her book I was just reading this morning, she writes about how China, she's actually seen how China does use and did consider sending out their 160,000 children because it definitely was a form of self diplomacy. They wanted to have positive relations with the United States. And when I sit in on Hague meetings, I know that foreign aid is sent in exchange for children. The Philippines, your relationship with the Philippines is a huge case in point. Those children are being sent to America in exchange for foreign aid. Australia actually prohibits it.

Lynelle Long [00:29:02]:
So when I sit in on these government meetings, I know that Australia does not connect at all any of its foreign aid and it does not expect any of those countries it sends foreign aid to to give them back children in exchange Whereas the United States, it definitely happens, you send vast amounts of foreign able up until Trump, you know, to many countries. But it was, you know, an exchange. We'll give you, you know, military might or, or things that the United States can offer and you give us children. It's a, it's a trade.

Walker Bird [00:29:38]:
How are the children taken in the country of origin? I mean, how does the state do that?

Lynelle Long [00:29:44]:
Yeah, well, it depends on country to country and, and, and you know, we're seeing a lot more of this documented country by country as, as things are exposed 70 years later. But you know, it's a variety of means, so it's very hard to answer that because it depends. So I'll answer and name a few countries. So China, for example, that was the one child policy that really entered the investigated that because China had heaps of families who weren't allowed to keep their children. What do you do with all these surplus children that family planning and the government was doing when they were taking these children? Well, they were secretly shipping them off to countries like America to be sold for US$40,000 per child. The families never knew, they never knew that their children were being even sent abroad. It's only coming out now with books like what Barbara's published where they're going. Wow.

Lynelle Long [00:30:36]:
We had absolutely no idea that our government was sending out children. They took off us and sent them overseas. Vietnam. There are enough legal cases for me to see that even with Operation Baby Lift, a government sanctioned, you know, apparently agreed upon plan that when those hundreds of children were taken out of Vietnam at the fall of the Vietnamese, the South, that, you know, a lot of those children hadn't even had relinquishment documents from their parents. And you can see the legal cases where the some of the wealthiest or the best abled men Vietnamese who followed their children to Vietnam to try and get them back, actually lost their legal cases because they had no legs to stand on in a foreign country trying to find, trying to fight a foreign massive superpower like the United States to claim back their children that have been taken. So you see time and time again many documented histories of country after country where this is a form of sending children, where the birth parents often don't even know what's even happened to their children. They just either get told some kind of lie or it's the children are outright taken from them and they have no power for recourse and, and they get funneled through a system called inter country adoption, which on the adoptive parents side looks legitimate, looks clean because you get papers that are falsified to tell you that, no, we looked for the parents and we couldn't find them anywhere. That's actually not often the truth.

Lynelle Long [00:32:14]:
And we are knowing in our community of adoptees, and we. We find the truth eventually because of the people that do reunite with families, where they actually say, my documents are completely just rubbish. They're not even anywhere near the truth of even what happened. And, you know, a lot of people, like journalists and independent people, are finding birth families who talk and who'll say, I had my child stolen, like, or I was in a situation of extreme, extreme crisis. You know, like families from Vietnam or families in Cambodia or families in Chile in a military dictatorship where the children are just literally, you know, taken and they just never know what even happens to them. So it is not the same as domestic adoption. You know, I think there's a big difference between domestic adoption and international adoption. And I say that in the sense of domestic adoption is happening in countries like, you know, the wealthy countries.

Lynelle Long [00:33:18]:
And it's a very different set of scenarios of why families are in poverty or stricken with generations of trauma. You have very different histories. What happens in international adoption is that layered over some of those similar sets of circumstances is that you get the language differences, the cultural, legal differences, where often the birth families know nothing about actually the legal concept of what adoption even is. They. In many of these birth countries, they think of it as akin to. They think it's a sponsorship. So when Americans go to them and say, I can see you're living in poverty and you're. And you're stuck right now because you can't feed your family.

Lynelle Long [00:34:00]:
How about we take your child and we'll go and educate it and we'll have it and look after it, and everything will be great. They just think this is like an extended family kind of relationship thing and that you're offering them some form of sponsorship, like a scholarship, they don't realize that you're actually taking away their parental rights because they have no such concept in a lot of these cultures. And this is particularly true in African countries where you've had a lot of, you know, a lot of trickery going on because the parents didn't understand anything. That's a Western concept culturally and had no clue. And they just overlay their own cultural understanding of this big extended community thing and think that it's the same, not realizing it's completely not. So, you know, I have videos of. Of the birth families in Ethiopia and Uganda, for example, where they're saying, we were outright tricked. We didn't understand that what was being explained to us was actually taking our children away from us forever.

Lynelle Long [00:35:06]:
They said, you know, they're like, that is not what we thought we agreed to. So, you know, there's just so many extra layers of complication, misunderstanding, cultural differences, language barriers. Plus you've got the massive disparity between resources. You know, inter country adoption, when it comes down to it, is all about who has resources and who doesn't. Which are the people and which is the side that has all the power, the privilege and the resources versus which is the side that has no power, no resources and definitely no legal help to even, you know, even when they realize that they've been tricked or duped or taken advantage of, they've got no recourse. I like to, I like to give the example of. I'm not sure if any of you have seen lion, the film lion on Netflix. It's.

Lynelle Long [00:35:58]:
It's one of the inter country doctor stories. Yeah, the Indian boy in Australia actually who found the. Using Google Maps. He's his birth family, you know, 40 years later because he was adopted as an older child when he got lost in the streets of India. That story is really interesting when you juxtapose that against. Do you know about the Madeleine McCann story? The British family that went traveling to Spain and had their daughter taken, or she disappeared mysteriously when they were having a holiday in Spain. Now, why I bring that up is because this is a good way to emphasize the difference in who has and who hasn't. So in Madeleine McCann's situation, and I don't begrudge them all of the help they've been given, that is not the intention of why I say this, but what I'm saying is that her family were white, her parents were white.

Lynelle Long [00:36:55]:
They got a lot of media attention. I mean, that story, if You Google Madeleine McCann is all over the Internet and the world for trying to find that lost child. You compare that to Saru in Lion. His birth mother from India also lost her child, which was Saroo, the Indian boy who got shipped away to Australia and adopted. He was lost for 40 years. Did she get any help when she went to the police or to any places to look for her Indian boy? No, not one iota. Not one piece of media coverage. Nothing.

Lynelle Long [00:37:28]:
What I highlight here is, is that if you're a person of color in a poorer country and you lose your child, there is not one iota of help made available to you. And I'm reading that now even in these Chinese stories that Barbara has shared in her book the Bamboo Grove, where thousands of Chinese adoptees have also been taken, stolen, whatever, and their parents have no recourse for help at all compared to the Madeline McCann family, where the world media is just spotlighting them and all over them because they're white, they're privileged. So that's why I try to portray that story, because it's about who has and who doesn't have in this world. And why is it that we deem one set of parents as worthy of help? Resources putting legislation in place to make sure that they can adopt, whereas we don't put anything in place for those who are losing their children, want to fight to keep the rights to their children, but yet we don't empower them at all. And so what I'm saying is the Hague Convention and many of these structural tools that are in place to facilitate the transfer, one way does not exist in reverse, the other to help empower those less powerful. So inter country adoption is a lot about justice, injustice, resources, who has, who hasn't, and who has the privilege and the power versus those who don't. And, you know, I hope that some people think a little bit more deeply about it. You know, after, after possibly listening to this.

Lynelle Long [00:39:02]:
Yeah.

Walker Bird [00:39:03]:
One of the things that you advocate for is access to birth records. And I do want to touch on that. As an attorney, the paper trail is always critical. And it struck me as you were describing the process of either being duped or your child's just taken unbeknownst to you, etc, there's just, there's, you know, in the United States, you gave us a chart, or you sent me a chart that showed, I think, the majority of states. And I don't want to misstate it, it's really important. But it looked to me like the majority of states in the United States do not give access at all. And then there's a handful, there may be three that give full access and then there's some that are. It's like in the middle.

Walker Bird [00:39:45]:
But I mean, there's no way to trace it with no access.

Lynelle Long [00:39:49]:
Absolutely. And so we are born and placed in families where we just have no means to find who do we come from. It is like a fundamental human need to know who we are. And being even if you got the most incredible adoptive parents in the world, that does never make up for. But I don't actually know who I am because I'm not from them. It is such a fundamental human need to know who you are at the core you know, who was I born to? Who do I look like? Whose traits do I have? And when we're placed in adoptive families, you know, we don't always get so called matched. It's not really matching because how can they match an infant with some set of parents when you don't even know what that child's personality is even like as an infant? So that whole concept of matching is just again, an adoption terminology made up to make it look like it's, it's somehow made in heaven. But the reality is that so many of us get place and we end up growing up feeling like round pegs in square holes.

Lynelle Long [00:40:55]:
We feel like we don't fit and you can't get away from that feeling. And that's why so many of us suffer so much mental health challenges, because we are trying to be chameleons. We are trying our hardest to fit and be what we're supposed to be, to fit this narrative. But yet deep down inside, there's a truth in us that rings out and says, I need to know who I am. So when we even brave enough to even go looking for that, we are faced with insurmountable barriers. Legislation doesn't support us. And so much of our documentation in adoption records, especially in inter country, is falsified. There was no one checking to make sure that, you know, that what's documented is correct.

Lynelle Long [00:41:48]:
There's no one verifying that indeed the people who purportedly brought the child in and gave it up is even their relatives. You know, like there's no DNA testing to make sure that if you're signing and relinquishing your child, that they are indeed biologically DNA connected to this child that they're signing over. So you can see how easy it is for someone else to be placed in, in their place to go, oh yeah, I'm the birth mother here, I'm signing away. And in fact, we have it documented that, you know, a lot of the Sri Lankan adoption were done where they would purposely hire a pretend birth mother to do the thumb imprint and pretend that she's signing away her child. And the reason why they found out about that is because they even gave a photo of that woman to the child's parents. That child grew up, goes and finds that woman years later. And the woman then says, oh, actually I'm not your mother. And they even do a DNA test to prove it.

Lynelle Long [00:42:44]:
And she says, I was actually paid to do that. So this is the adoption industry. It is rife with trickery, corruption, falsification, because it is a system that allows it because there are no checks and balances, no external independent vetting to make sure that any of the records that even get put together for an inter country adoptee are even true or not. It is rubber stamped by a government and usually it is the very same government who are paid, bribed or corrupted to actually put all this paperwork through because they're making 40 to 60,000 US dollars off every adoption. Why would they not do it? Who could resist such easy money? And this has happened around the world. For every birth country that we come from, there is not one country that's untouched. And in my network of thousands of inter country adoptees, I have counted how many birth countries. There are over 45 birth countries that we come from and represent.

Lynelle Long [00:43:41]:
You know, it's, it's huge. This is an industry across the globe.

Walker Bird [00:43:47]:
How many years have you been. Sorry, Teresa, the spotlight here. How many years have you been advocating for human rights, for adoptee rights? When did you start this?

Lynelle Long [00:44:01]:
Hard to put a direct number on that, but I've been. I started my network 27 years ago. It took me about the first 15 years where I was not politically involved like I am now, but more just. I just want to tell our stories and you know, that soft, nice stuff. Just want to share our stories because in that day nothing existed. There were no stories on the Internet, there were no visibility of us. So we've basically paved all that way and done that. But then once I'd done that first 15 years of connecting us as a community and hearing and sharing our stories publicly, I then started to connect the dots with all of our stories and just go, my God, this is so systemic.

Lynelle Long [00:44:43]:
How can you. And I just felt so angry that so much of this has gone on and so many of the things that I'm talking about are happening on a day to day basis. And I'm going, how can we not speak up and stand up politically for what is wrong here? So, so yeah, probably that after 15 years I, I then, you know, started taking groups of us to meet governments and to say, you know, these are our needs. Why do we not even have post adoption support? Like America, the biggest adopting country in the world. You don't even have formalized, funded, mandatory post adoption support for these 600,000 adoptees that are in your country. It's a crime. And so many of them suffer mental health issues because the trauma upon trauma is, just gets too much to bear, you know, so just does my head in the reality of, you know, of what's actually going on. You know, if you really were doing adoption well, some of the mandatory things you do is make sure you've got funded post adoption support that's, that's got the expertise.

Lynelle Long [00:45:52]:
You know, like, why is it that adoptees don't know where to turn in the US for any help? Why are we looking for lawyers? Why are we looking for mental health practitioners who actually understand transracial interactions where we're placed in people who are white, who know nothing about our skin color, nothing, and know about our cultures and fail to even help us to integrate who we are. So, you know, there's just so many aspects of post adoption support that are missing that should be absolutely there already. After 70 years of inter country adoption in America. Yeah, so, so, so sorry to answer your question. Yeah, so the last 10 years, 12 years, I've been doing advocacy in particular, and I actually changed my network name to reflect that because I used to be called Inter Country Adoptee Support Network, which was reflecting that we were about peer support to each other. I then changed our name because I realized that I couldn't actually support everybody because some of us have such significant mental health issues that peer support just does not even cut the surface. They need professional help. But the other part was I needed to change our name because I realized the power of our voice.

Lynelle Long [00:47:13]:
There is something to be said for the trauma you go through when you leave such fundamental displacement, such fundamental identity erasure. And you've gotta find that again and figure out who you are and where you fit in the world. And you know, how the hell you fit between two countries and cultures and ethnicities and navigate all of that like our voice is a significant part of the healing journey where when you can find your voice and start to tell your story, that's when you start to heal. While you hold it all in and bury it. That's when the mental health issues just compound. Because as those of you like Teresa know, as mental health practitioners, you know, the, the trauma and the pain has to go somewhere. So if it's not coming out through your voice, it goes in through your body. You exhibit chronic mental illness, you exhibit chronic physical illness, et cetera, et cetera.

Lynelle Long [00:48:15]:
So finding your voice in my own experience personally, was such a life changing moment. To be able to harness my voice and to give power to our experience and start to speak out, to change the fundamental structures of what is there and is taken as, you know, a wonderful thing and assumed to be and to challenge that system and to turn it on its head and to shake it, you know, is. Is what our voices need to do in order to make sure this doesn't keep perpetuating to the younger generations.

Theresa Hubbard [00:48:59]:
You know, what comes to mind for me, Lynell, as a mental health professional who's worked with lots of people who have been adopted over the years, whether it was domestic or inter country.

Lynelle Long [00:49:16]:
What.

Theresa Hubbard [00:49:16]:
I think about is really even like our basic physiological experience, you know, as an infant or a young child, in being around someone who is familiar to us genetically. And I remember our mutual friend when I met her adopted family, who was extended family, I remember thinking when I saw her with all of them, she doesn't fit in here. Like, there isn't anybody here that mirrors her in any way. And then when she found her birth mother and we did that Skype session.

Lynelle Long [00:50:20]:
With her biological mom.

Theresa Hubbard [00:50:24]:
And I remember, I was like, oh, there you are. You know, she was in her mom. Like I could see her, you know, in that. The loss and the longing of just even her body looking for her mom's body or her body looking for her dad's body and her dad's no longer living. But even, you know, beyond the emotional distress, just the physiological distress that we just don't give any wait to at all.

Lynelle Long [00:51:04]:
Exactly.

Theresa Hubbard [00:51:06]:
And we all need mirroring. All of us do.

Lynelle Long [00:51:10]:
Yeah. Yeah, you've absolutely. So just got it.

Theresa Hubbard [00:51:17]:
Yeah.

Lynelle Long [00:51:17]:
And people in adoption just. Just think that it doesn't matter as long as they've got love. And it's like, no, it does matter.

Theresa Hubbard [00:51:28]:
Right.

Lynelle Long [00:51:28]:
You know, we can have all the love in the world, but it does not ever make up for that familiarity and even that connection. It's the connection more than anything. It's not just necessarily, you know, because a lot of biological children don't look just like their parents. Right. But it's, it's. It's more than just the looks, it's the genetic history. It's knowing about your family. How did they get to be where they are and who were they? They, like so many of us as just humans, need to know and understand our family story.

Lynelle Long [00:52:05]:
How did we come to be? How did my dad get to be, you know, in this industry or that job or, you know, like. Because there's usually a story behind how that came about, is usually a story about how your parents even came to even conceive you. We all naturally want to know our story. And you. I've. I've written my story a few times, but I've. I've, you know, tried to describe to people who don't understand what it's like to actually have a story that begins with, I'm adopted, you know, I don't know anything about myself. And, and that's.

Lynelle Long [00:52:40]:
We as adoptees, we become very adept at living with a. No, a non beginning. But it doesn't mean that just because we look like we're coping with that non beginning doesn't mean it doesn't impact us on a very deep level. Right. And it's why so many of us. And I can say this because I've done the research in my group of thousands of intercountry adoptees that 80% of us want to find our families, even if it's just to understand the basic questions of who are they, what are their names? You know, some of us, most of us just don't even know that. And we just don't even know how our parents even came to be together to even conceive us or where or in what part of the country, you know, and so these fundamental pieces of information about who we are is core to our sense of being and, well, being. And when you don't have it and when you miss it, it can't be just replaced by anyone.

Lynelle Long [00:53:46]:
It's even with the best adoptive parents in the world, their love, you know, they might be the most loving, amazing parents in the world. Right. Still does not undo the fact that you don't know who you are and you crave and want to know deeply who you are. And you know, and in saying that, I will say I don't speak for every adoptee. Not every adoptee ever wants to, but. Right. I would challenge that in saying that in my experience over the years I've been supporting is that we all change over time. And even if an adoptee right now says they don't want to, I would not be surprised, and I would probably put a bet on it to say that, you know, in the next 80 years, I can guarantee there'll be a point in their life where they'll finally go, maybe I do want to know now.

Lynelle Long [00:54:30]:
It's in. Everyone's timeline is different.

Walker Bird [00:54:33]:
Yes.

Lynelle Long [00:54:35]:
But even when they do get to that stage, there should be the ability to be able to find your heritage, your history, without massive barriers in the way that prevent you and without the untruths that you've got to unpack and unravel because, you know, we haven't even, you know, talked about things like the constant unraveling where you find out a new piece of information about yourself decade after decade. Like, I don't know how Many times my story has changed over the years, but every time I find out something new about myself, I have to redo the whole story in my head and go, oh, my God. Like, it wasn't what I thought. It was this. And it's this constant, you know, just trying to come to terms over and over again with new bits of information. And it's. It's exhausting for most adoptees. It literally is exhausting.

Lynelle Long [00:55:25]:
And that's why that, you know, emotional support is so important. Specialized emotional support. Yeah.

Theresa Hubbard [00:55:33]:
Yeah. You know, the other thing that comes to mind to me, Lynelle, is the assumption that because I have more resources, the child will have a better life.

Lynelle Long [00:55:51]:
Yeah, that's a big one.

Theresa Hubbard [00:55:54]:
It is.

Lynelle Long [00:55:55]:
And it's just. And I always challenge that to say you might materially, economically have more resources, but that does not ever, ever make up for a biological connection, a genetic mirroring, a. A ancestry that spans generations, that is that child's history. So material wealth, it's only one part of the pie. And sadly, adoption in the way that it's so transactional. You know, parents are screened according to their economic status, and if you're too poor, you don't usually get the ability to adopt because it's. It's really a privilege for the wealthier people. And that's, you know, that shows you straight away the inequity of it anyway.

Lynelle Long [00:56:45]:
Whereas domestic adoption, if it's. I know that in America, your domestic adoption is just as costly actually, as inter. Country, whereas in Australia, domestic adoption is actually free. So it's a very big difference between domestic and international, because we. We don't have privatized adoption here. It's only all done by government centralized. Yeah. So there's differences around the world, country to country, but yeah.

Theresa Hubbard [00:57:15]:
Such a big topic, Lynelle.

Lynelle Long [00:57:18]:
Yeah, We've just touched the surface. Right.

Walker Bird [00:57:24]:
I've got to ask.

Lynelle Long [00:57:25]:
Keep going.

Walker Bird [00:57:26]:
That you talked about that moment when you found your voice and kind of bringing it back to my Internet, knowing that struck me, and it may be finding your voice for a certain thing. I mean, at some point, you chose not to be a victim of all the trauma, and you chose to be an advocate. This. You know, lion, there's how I would describe you, and we're. I'm interested in. In hearing more about that. When did you find that voice and what was it like for you?

Lynelle Long [00:57:59]:
That's a hard question, because I think, you know, it's not like the voice and finding it happens at one point in time. I think that it's like Any journey of recovery and, and healing, it happens over layers and multiple stages. I definitely remember the very first time I told my story to a bunch of social workers in adoption, you know, where I was specifically telling my story to try and help them understand the complexity. So it's, you know, finding my voice was very much a chosen, selected way to do it because I knew that, you know, often you can tell a story of deep trauma and you can get brutalized by people listening because they're not trauma informed and they can actually invalidate you. I very specifically was careful about how and who I tell my story to and still am. That's why I checked you guys out first and say, hey, yeah, I'm gonna do an interview. Great. I'm very selective because I like to make sure that people are using my story for the right intention of which I'm intending not just to, you know, make a great trauma story for the hell of it.

Lynelle Long [00:59:03]:
Because, you know, people love trauma stories just to, I don't know, get interest. It's, you know, like squid games or something. We are not a squid games. You know, this is actually real. So finding my voice happened in multiple ways over multiple times. And definitely, you know, there are key steps. Like when I first took our group to the Australian Prime Minister, you know, the top, top high power in the, in the country. That was very significant.

Lynelle Long [00:59:28]:
Step two. And ever since then, you know, and then getting our voices to the Hague and then getting our voices to the United nations, they have all been steps I have taken that have helped me get stronger and stronger every time in my voice. And that's why, I guess I'm such a loud voice now and so articulate and so clear on my messages because I've had many years of practicing and saying what needs to be said and learning how to say it succinctly and efficiently. Whereas if you had heard me in my first, you know, year or two of, of running my network, I, I would have been saying all sorts of crap. But I look back now and just cringe and go, oh my God. I mean, I honestly didn't even know the proper adult adoption language, right? I didn't even know the term inter country adoption was actually the legal term for it. I called it, you know, I just said I was transracial and I'm adoptee. I didn't know any.

Lynelle Long [01:00:24]:
I didn't know any language. So finding our voices, it's a kind of like a process because I had to educate myself on even what the terminology was then. I had to educate Myself from the perspective of the trauma, informed perspective of. Of it, overlay it, then I've had to inform myself from the legal perspective over it. And so there's just so many different facets in which I've had to educate myself and become more aware in order to make my voice more powerful and be able to do things effectively. But, yeah, I do remember the times in which my voice was very shaky and I was very scared to tell my story, whereas now it feels like way in the distant horizon that that was even a thing because I'm such. I am so grounded in who I am now and, you know, and I'm so confident, I'm so liberated because I've done so much in my life to take action, to take back power, to reclaim myself and to hold those to account who harmed me, you know, and I've still got some parts to go with that. But there's, there's key factors in my journey of which I've, I've taken in order to find that voice, empower that voice and to liberate my voice fully.

Lynelle Long [01:01:51]:
Yeah, because a lot of adoptees that. That weight of gratitude, that's probably the hardest part to overcome in order to find your voice and speak your truth. We especially harder if you've had a loving, amazing adoptive family because it almost ties you and holds you down from speaking your truth. More for me, because I had a harmful adoptive family, it's actually in effect become easier to speak up because even society has now deemed through my criminal court actions that indeed, what my family did was wrong to me. So it liberates me on another whole emotional level to actually speak my truth, because now I can do so. And even if people dared to say, well, you know, you're just, you're just one of a minority or whatever, I'm going, yeah, but it was criminal, right? So people can't deny that. Whereas before my abuse in my adoption was shown in court to have happened and he pled guilty, people could question it and go, oh, you just, you just a crybaby adoptee who's going on and wanting to bemoan your whole life. Right.

Lynelle Long [01:03:04]:
And this is the problem is that as an adoptee, if you dare to speak up about anything painful, hard, difficult, challenging, most people will just shut you down with, but aren't you lucky? Aren't you grateful? Haven't you had great family? Aren't you in a great country? And they'll rattle off feel 50,000 reasons why you should be happy? Which completely ignores and diminishes and denies your. What you're trying to say, like we, we can hold dual feelings at once. We can be. I am, I am so grateful I've been adopted to this amazing country, Australia. Thank God I wasn't adopted to America because I would be on the deportee list because my adoption was done so terrible. I have no paperwork. So, you know, so I am thankful for many, many things. But I can also hold hand in hand with that and speak out and say, but the way that adoption is done is unethical at its, you know, the best and completely, you know, not in our human rights interest.

Lynelle Long [01:04:11]:
You know, the fact that our identities are obliterated and wiped out and we don't have access to it is a human rights to problem fundamental flaw. And you know, so things like that, you know, I can speak out about now very loud and clear because I've educated myself about a lot of the different arenas from which, you know, connects in, in order to try and help the layperson understand what it is we're talking about. I used to never talk about my abuse or about that part of my adoption or indeed my own story because I knew that most people try to shut you down straight away if they're not trauma informed and they try to tell you how, you know, wonderful it's been despite it all. So yeah, it's not easy finding your voice. And there are many barriers that most adoptees will be confronted with. Just people's perceptions and attitudes of ignorance where they just don't know any better and will just sprout the common narrative of, of adoption back at them as well. What are you talking about? So, you know, I challenge people who think like that to just take a step back and try to listen and ask more probing questions to allow that adoptee to actually tell you what their experience has been like without you judging it and without you expecting gratitude or, you know, some lovely story to come out of it. Just, you know, a allow them their truth because that's in fact what many of them need to heal.

Theresa Hubbard [01:05:42]:
So yes, yeah. Lynelle, the, the work that you do that is your life is heavy.

Lynelle Long [01:05:52]:
It is very heavy.

Theresa Hubbard [01:05:53]:
How do you care for yourself in all of this that you do?

Lynelle Long [01:05:59]:
I have found really good ways for myself to nurture my inner self. You know, things like I do a lot of walking, I do a lot of sport. I, I, yeah, listen to a lot of music and I have a core life outside of adoption as well. So I make sure that I'm balanced and that I'm not just all adoption I take time out. I. I distance myself from the community when I need to. I don't make myself fully available. I have boundaries.

Lynelle Long [01:06:32]:
I've learned a lot over 27 years how to actually manage myself, because, yeah, if you. If you're going to be a support to people with this much trauma, you've got to maintain a balance in your own life, and you've got to find your own healing. And I was fortunate enough to have some incredibly talented and wise people, healers, who helped me heal from my significant traumas. And they, you know, I couldn't have done it without them. It's. Yeah, I would still be stuck in that vicious cycle I used to be where I was in my head, spinning around, going 100 miles an hour, and, you know, just stuck in crisis mode all the time and constantly sabotaging my life and, you know, just not even able to have a healthy relationship with anybody, let alone myself. So it's taken a lot of work to heal and to come through, but it's. It's definitely helped me in good stead in order to better support others.

Lynelle Long [01:07:33]:
And a lot of. A lot of the action that I've taken in terms of legal has really helped that healing really, to the end of its journey. So I do feel right now that I'm at pretty much the end of what I need to do for myself. And a big part of that has been creating the network of support that I've created, you know, to. To. To give back to the community and make sure that others don't have to do it alone like I had to, but to, you know, to make sure that I'm providing what I would have loved for myself. Someone who gets it, someone who understands, someone who can validate.

Theresa Hubbard [01:08:10]:
Yeah, that drives me, too.

Lynelle Long [01:08:13]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. YouTube.

Theresa Hubbard [01:08:17]:
Yeah.

Lynelle Long [01:08:19]:
Yeah, I can hear with you, too. I'd love to reverse situation and hear about you guys and understand how, first of all, how did you become a lawyer who's so emotionally switched on? Walker, I'm just like, you know, like, wow, what the hell? This is so rare. Where did you come from? What did you go through to get there? And for you, Teresa, you know, I know that having studied psychology myself, I know that a lot of us have, you know, obviously lived trauma in order to be curious about it, to try and unpack it and figure it out. Right. So. So I can imagine there's a backstory there, too, so I'd love to hear that.

Theresa Hubbard [01:08:58]:
Thank you. Oh, it was such a great conversation. Lynelle, thank you.

Theresa Hubbard [01:09:03]:
Thank you for joining us today. We are excited to explore life with you. We encourage curiosity, self growth and we strive to be more compassionate every day.